Everybody keeps on sampling the best and cleanest piano ever! here is a completely different approach. We sampled an old Pleyel Grand Piano (F-71240 model from 1928) with vintage gear like a studer console and tube microphones, it has the rich and warm sound of the old jazz/blues or even classical music recordings.

The demo songs are performed by Jean-Michel Bernard (former composer for Ray Charles, film music composer) and Romain Collin, a very talented jazz French piano player based in NYC.

Preferences

The OldBlackGrand is now in V3 and inludes many new features to make it one of the most complete pianos on the market.
Each feature is detailed below and of course it still contains the features of the previous versions like the release volume, pedal noise and key noise.

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The release Volume: the sound produced when you release a key if a note was going on.

The Key Noises: the sound produced when you release a key and no corresponding sustain was played.

The Pedal Noise: the sound produced when you press or release the pedal, it adds a lot to the realism.

The Tone: a simple way to make the piano sound brighter or darker.

The sostenuto CC, also called the middle pedal. You can sustain selected notes, while other notes remain unaffected.

The polyphony. If you lower the buffer or simply want to be light on CPU, then increase or lower this value.

The Reverb. We use a convolution reverb and you can adjust the dry and wet parts separately as well as choose from a large selection of high quality Impulse Responses.

Round Robin. We added a software round robin feature for the users that need to play repetitive pieces.

Three microphone positions

We recorded the OldBlackGrand with two microphone positions:

The Close position with a pair of microphones close to the strings inside the piano to provide deep bass and rich resonances.

The Rim position with a pair of microphones at the side of the piano to give more of a soloist playing with a piano perspective.

You can enable / disable, load / unload and mix each microphone position separately to get exactly the sound you want.

Each microphone has three different controls:

Gain.

On / Off: You can easily enable or disable each microphone position.

Load: You can load / unload the samples of each microphone position. This saves Ram usage if you only use one position. Of course the controls are greyed out when the samples are unloaded.

Resonances

The resonances on a piano give some kind of a reverb effect when all of the strings start resonating.
There are two kinds of resonances that are important to model on a piano, the pedal down resonances and the sympathetic resonances between the held notes. Both these effects are present in the OldBlackGrand, you can even change the amount of each of them.

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Here is in detail what every control offers.

Pedal Down Resonance controls the amount of the resonance when you press the sustain pedal.

The True Pedal Action enables the progressive resonance on pedal down when you press a chord and press the pedal afterwards.

Sympathetic Resonance controls the volume of the sympathetic resonance effect. If you want a piano that sings the harmonics, you can add a little more of that effect.

Symp Poly controls how many voices you want to allow for the sympathetic resonance effect.

Repedaling / Half pedaling

On a real piano, the pedal is not a simple on and off and in classical music, people often use the repedaling and half pedaling.

Repedaling allows you to "restart" a chord that has been released with the pedal if the decay is not ended yet. this is especially used when you want to blend chords together.

Helf Pedaling is as its name implies what happens when you play with the pedal half pressed. the decay is much longer and as the strings are not completely dampened, you hear some resonances.

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The half Pedal can be enabled or disabled from the interface but you can also control the size of the cc zone where the half pedal effect will occur. Half pedal min and max are the minimum and maximum values of the sustain pedal cc.

MIDI controls

We added a few midi controls to the older version. The sostenuto and sustain CC can be changed in case you want for example use an expression pedal instead of a regular on off pedal. You can also change the Midi curve, the dynamics and the velocity response to really adjust the library to your liking, keyboard and playing style.

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The velocity Sensitivity controls the volume curve, so how easily you get to a high volume, but the lowest and highest volumes stays the same.

The velocity amount controls the dynamics, so the minimum volume associated with the lowest velocity.

The MIDI remapper controls the mapping, so which velocity layer corrsponds to which velocity imput.

The Min and Max Velocity are simply the minimum and maximum velocity that you will have to play to hear the piano.

The Sustain CC is by default at 64 but can be changed to any other controller if you need to.

The Sostenuto CC is by default at 66 but can be changed to any other controller if you need to.

Sample player

OldBlackGrand comes with its own sample player, the UVI Workstation 3(requires v3.0.0 or later).
We provide it for free with every library that you buy, you don't need to buy an expensive sampler to use our products. It works on Mac (10.7 or later) and PC (windows 7 or later), in standalone or as a plugin (VST / AU / AAX ) and in 64 bits only. You can find more info about it here.

We use the iLok system to protect our products and you can choose to register your license to your computer or to an iLok dongle.
If you decide to use an iLok dongle, both V1 and V2 are compatible with our products.
You can activate your license on up to 3 computers or iLok dongles at the same time and you can deactivate one and activate another as many times as you want.

Registration

Once your order is complete, you will be provided with a serial number.

You will then be able to register it to your iLok account from our website on this page (you need to be logged in to access this page). The whole process is described in the FAQ (instructions + screencast).

I am so impressed of how this sounds. The beauty of this instrument by AcousticSamples it's just irresistible. I have tons of different piano VSTs, and so far, this is my favorite one which I will use for every single application.
It's hard to believe that an old pleyel grand can sound even better than many of the famous grands out there; you don't want to believe it. But at the end of the day you say to yourself: hey, maybe this is one of those secrets that some great piano players have out there, and they don't want to tell you. I was comparing it with a piano that I hear in some great recordings, and wow this is it. Yes, this is it.
It sounds rich, sweet, big and bold. Not just that, this gives you the illusion that you are playing a real piano! You can feel the vibration of the strings inside of the soundboard, and I don't know, there's something very special with this VST.

September 29, 2018

By MNOnline

It sounds rich, sweet, big and bold. Not just that, this gives you the illusion that you are playing a real piano! You can feel the vibration of the strings inside of the soundboard, and I don't know, there's something very special with this VST.

November 27, 2015

By Craig

There is something unique about the tone of a high quality piano of this vintage, that modern pianos can't capture. The aged soundboard of a handcrafted piano such as the Pleyel sampled here is a beautiful thing. This sound breathes and sings like very few other virtual pianos - you can really get lost in the music.
With all virtual pianos I own, adjusting the velocity volume, dynamics and velocity curve is essential to bring out the best tone, dynamics & responsiveness. Default settings often sound flat on my setup (Yamaha CP4 Stage), but once matched to the keyboard velocity & touch, they really open up and sound/feel much better. The Old Black Grand benefited greatly from this process, although it was much easier & quicker to find the "sweet spot" with the settings.
The upper register is stunning, and the resonances absolutely beautiful and authentic. UNIQUE and INSPIRING!

May 08, 2015

By Carl Bugbee

Fantastic Sounds! These samples are really top notch and blows away most workstation and sampling keyboards. Not only is this product awesome, the customer support is better than any I've ever encountered. I had a couple suggestions and an issue, they not only responded quickly, they ended up editing their program to fix the issue and added a volume adjustment tool for every key in case certain notes were strangely louder than others. Absolutely amazing.